The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction (anthology, 2010)

This is an anthology from Fall River Press (the publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, I think) collecting "classic" (i.e., public domain) stories of the apocalypse, ranging from Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" (1816) to H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Nyarlathotep" (1920). I picked it up because I wanted to read the Robert Cromie novel The Crack of Doom (1895), and this was its most accessible contemporary reprinting. Several years later, I've finally gotten around to reading the rest of the book. I reread short stories I'd previously read, but not novels: this means I skipped rereading Crack of Doom as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913).

I taught a class on apocalyptic fiction many years ago; an idea that I discussed in that class in the context of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is that the concept of an apocalypse (in the nonreligious sense) is dependent on a certain understanding of time, one that didn't really emerge until the 1800s. I think in our present moment, apocalyptic narratives usually emerge from an awareness of how societies change: we know we might destroy it, be it from bombs or medicine gone wrong or environmental collapse or whatever. (Isaac Asimov discusses this in his essay "Social Science Fiction," arguing you can only get science fiction once it's clear that societies can evolve and change in fundamental ways quite quickly; he blames the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.)  

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
compiled by Michael Kelahan

Collection published: 2010
Contents originally published: 1816-1920
Acquired: January 2019
Read: June 2025

But before the idea that we could destroy society emerged, there was a different one that runs across the stories presented in this book: the idea of deep time, that human existence is only a very recent thing across the span of the Earth and the universe, and thus we have no reason to think it will last. We have a lot of natural disasters here: humanity undone by comets, or the sun going dark, or the sun expanding, or what have you. Once you understand how small humanity is on the scale of all time, then you also have no reason to think it will last.

Many of the stories here are good examples of what Isaac Asimov could call technology-dominant (or gadget) stories: they're not concerned with character or even society (as later apocalyptic fiction usually is), but more the mechanics of it. What would happen if the sun overheated the Earth? How could a comet wipe everything out? This means that many of the stories are technically interesting, noteworthy for what they represent in a shift in how humans understand time... but not actually all that good. This is definitely the space that George Griffith's "A Corner in Lightning" (1898) is in, for example. (Which is a little disappointing, in that while Griffith wasn't a great writer, he was usually a more interesting one than he is here.)

That said, even some of these are good to read: Robert Duncan Milne's "Into the Sun" (1882) is kind of technical, but visceral, chronicling the Earth growing so hot no one will live. His sequel story, "Plucked from the Burning" (1882), reminded me a bit of On the Beach in its tour through a destroyed familiar landscape. I don't think "The Star" (1897) is H. G. Wells's best work, but you know of course it's well thought out; similarly, Grant Allen's talent for landscape description serves him well in "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (1897).

Still, there are some highlights, particularly where you see the way science fiction will go coming into existence. In what's kind of a side comment in Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn discusses how initially, sf has what she calls "the incredible invention story" (Asimov's gadget story), but that it "permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror." Later, sf moves into what she calls "the completed future," where instead of showing the transition from the present moment, the reader is immersed in a world unfamiliar to them (p. xiv). The best stories here are of this type, placing the reader in the postapocalyptic future and letting them build the picture themselves. 

These ones feel particularly modern, and I suppose it's not a coincidence that they're all written by authors who have significance outside of proto-sf. For example, I really enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's "For the Ahkoond" (1888, I think; Kelahan doesn't give an original publication date for it), told as a report from a forty-sixth-century archaeologist exploring a North America devastated by a New Ice Age. Along similar lines, Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1912) is evocative, and inventive in how it has someone who did live through the apocalypse try to tell its story to someone born after it, who thus has no frame of reference for what the world used to be like. (It reminded me a lot of Wells's The War in the Air [1908]; surely London read it, though he was doing similar work already in The Iron Heel [1908].)

I also really like E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909). I'd read it before of course, but I'd forgotten how clever it was, Forster showing us the darkness of this future by telling the story from the perspective of someone who doesn't see how dark it all is. A lot of his contemporaries would have done a lot worse; it's probably not a coincidence that he was a king of modernism. I think a lot of ink has been spilled about the relationship between sf and realism (including by me, in my never-finished book), but I wonder if there's more to be done about modernism and sf. (It's probably been done; I should ask my colleague Cari Hovanec.)

Anyway, some duds—it would be hard to imagine a collection of pre-1900 sf that wouldn't have at least a few—but a good sampling of what was going on in the genre we know so well today before it was the genre we know so well today.

Five Very Good Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction Novels (not by H. G. Wells)

Earlier this week on Reddit, a post in r/printSF (the very best sub) asked, essentially, "Who are all the good nineteenth-century science fiction writers who aren't Jules Verne and H. G. Wells?"

Well, never was a question so well designed for me! Unfortunately, I came to it kind of late; I did write a reply but I think most people had moved on from the thread by then. But it occurred to me as given I gave five novels, the comment would also make a good installment of my sporadic "Five Very Good..." series here on my blog, where I list five things in some category.

These aren't necessarily the five best; I've skipped some heavy hitters like Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) in favor of some less common and probably less good good ones because I found them particularly interesting in some way. Unfortunately, the thing you will find when you read a lot of nineteenth-century British science fiction is that the reason we only talk about Wells now is that, largely, only Wells was any good. Wells was excellent at taking the tropes of what was a pretty crappy genre in his day and doing very clever things with them, such that he redefined the tropes! Wells didn't write the first alien invasion story or the first time travel story or the first invisibility story... but he did write the first good alien invasion story, the first good time travel story, the first good invisibility story. (And what I mean by good is that his stories have both the exact right level of scientific rigor but also the ability to say something about a concept outside of science.)

But anyway, here are books I would recommend if you want to read some fun nineteenth-century sf. If I've reviewed them on this blog before, I've included a link to the post.

Jane Loudon, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
For a while I was obsessed with this book... and I still do think it's pretty great. It's a world where multiple revolutions have left England a Catholic country with a matriarchal monarchy. Education has come to all classes, leading to incredibly smart laborers-- and thus rich people act incredibly stupid so no one mistakes them for poor people. Technological inventions abound, extending to sending mail by loading letters into metal balls that are launched into a steam-powered cannon, aiming for a net at the house of the recipient. Which is awesome and hilarious all at once. There's a lot of satire going on, here: on class, on gender, on science, on progress. Some of it is funny, all of it is fascinating. Genuinely fun and readable; most early sf isn't. And I haven't even gotten to the mummy accidentally resurrected by a mad scientist who hides in the English palace and dispenses political advice. (You can get the original three-volume edition from Google Books, but I think the reprint edited by Alan Rauch is just fine for casual reading despite being abridged; he captures all the good bits.)

Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885)
Several generations into the future, after a mysterious disaster has ripped through the heart of Victorian Britain, the Thames is a giant lake and London a deadly swamp. With the upper and middle classes having fled the country for parts unknown, civilization and technology collapsed, leaving a new feudal order to come about, constantly under threat from invasion by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scottish, all out for revenge. The first third of the novel is just a description of this postapocalyptic world, telling how animals and plants have been affected (Jefferies was a nature writer), and about the political and social setup, with marauding bands of "gipsies" and the sinister Bushmen lurking between cities for hapless travelers. It's well-thought-out, detailed world-building, the best I know of in the nineteenth century, almost Tolkienesque. There are so many fruitful avenues for stories suggested in just five chapters.

George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893)
Griffith isn't a great writer, but he is a genuinely clever one, basically the first guy to unite the Verne-style "amazing technology" story with the Butler/Lytton-style "strange society" story, giving us a novel about anarchists who use airships to bomb Europe into submission... leading to a utopia! He wrote a lot of novels, and was the leading writer of "future war" fiction for a long time; Wells even makes fun of him in The War in the Air. Angel is his first and best book. Lots of fun stuff; it was reissued under the title "Tsar Wars" for a reason, though the best edition to get is the annotated one Steven McLean edited for Victorian Secrets Press.

T. Mullett Ellis, Zalma (1896)
Count Pahlen (a Russian nobleman, Tsarist counter-spy, and professor of biology) give his illegitimate daughter up to the Catholic Church, which raises her in a convent and plans to marry her to the heir to the throne of England to turn it into a Catholic country, but the plan fails, and Zalma rejoins her father, who is actually the ringleader of an anarchist conspiracy. Her father dies before he can bring his plans to fruition, and so Zalma decides to dump anthrax on all the capital cities of Europe from balloons. And that just scratches the surface of how bonkers this book is. Sometimes meandering and dull, of course, but usually fascinating. (The book has no modern reprint, but the complete text is available on the HathiTrust site.)

M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
Not quite nineteenth-century, I guess, but close enough. What would you do if you were the last person left alive? Why, you'd probably conclude that the world was made for you-- why else would only you have survived?-- and so you'd tour the cities of Europe, burning each of them down when you were done. Because once you're done with them, certainly no one else is ever going to see them. The novel is filled with brilliant bits where we get to see the narrator trying to cope with being the last man-- and seeing the world those last panicky humans left behind. There's just a lot of nice little moments peppered throughout the novel, which feels so intense and so real. Shiel's ability to depict human isolation without ever getting dull is extraordinary. (I recommend the "Bison Frontiers of the Imagination" edition, which uses the weirder 1929 revised text.)

Two New Publications: The First Female Scientist, Air-Ships, and More!

I literally had two pieces of writing come out in two days this week, even though I completed both of them back in 2017 at completely different times.

One is a peer-reviewed article in the Wilkie Collins Journal, part of a special issue called "The Heart and Science of Wilkie Collins and his Contemporaries." My contribution is about Wilkie Collins's novel Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882-83). The novel's big but previously largely unheralded claim to fame (or so I assert) is that its main antagonist is the first female scientist in British literature.

I'm very happy with this article. It has its roots in a seminar paper I wrote in a Philosophy of Science graduate seminar back in 2011; this was revised to fit into my dissertation at some point, and then last summer, revised to come back out of it. I thought it would be an easy gig, but I basically had to rewrite the whole piece from the ground up to make it work. (One of my dissertation committee wrote a comment on that section of my diss that they found it unconvincing; I remember bristling at the time, but when I reread it last summer, I realized I agreed.) But I'm glad I did, as it's a much stronger piece, and hopefully I can fold it back into the book project, now a piece with a much clearer argument and a much more compelling interpretation of the novel.

The article is called "The Female Amateur Science and the Sense for Conduct in Heart and Science: Blind to Matter and Morals," but the most recent issue of the Wilkie Collins Journal is always password restricted to members of the Wilkie Collins Society, so you'll have to wait until another one is out to read it if you're not a member.

Here's the first two paragraphs, though:

The real nineteenth century was replete with women of science. From Mary Anning, the legendary fossil finder, to Hertha Marks Ayrton, the suffragist and electrical engineer, the role of women in the actual science of nineteenth-century Britain was substantial, and it has been well chronicled by many. However, fictional women of science are much thinner on the ground. While the man of science recurred through the novels of writers such as Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy from the 1850s onward, it was not until the 1890s that the literary woman of science made much of a mark, and then she was almost always a villain. The least evil of them is probably the amateur geologist Grace Waring in Kathleen ‘Iota’ Mannington Caffyn’s 1894 novel A Yellow Aster. Grace is one half of a science-obsessed married couple more interested in geology than parenting, and her emotional negligence causes her daughter to grow up incapable of love. Most of the women of science in 1890s literature were villains in scientific romances: George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff, or The Syren of the Skies (1895), T. Mullett Ellis’s Zalma (1896), and L. T. Meade’s The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898) all have female terrorists with scientific training for antagonists. Susan Hroneck suggests that these novels ‘lack the means to conceptualize the woman scientist […] [T]he woman scientist is not linked with science’s fantastic future, but instead the villainous women of history and myth’ (par. 2). It is not until 1909, in H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, that there is a non-villainous female scientist character of significance.

The earliest fictional woman of science is Mrs. Maria Gallilee in Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882–83). Mrs. Gallilee is a self-educated scientific amateur, and an active participant in the scientific social scene of the 1880s. She is capable of performing dissections, and is well-versed on a range of scientific topics, from dinosaur dung to atmospheric explosions, from the theory of acoustics to protoplasm and the origins of life. Within the London scientific community, she is regarded highly both for her scientific opinions and her well-appointed scientific soirees. Much of the critical discussion of science in Heart and Science tends to focus on the novel’s vivisectionist, Dr. Nathan Benjulia—perhaps naturally, since Collins wrote the novel for the express purpose of condemning vivisection. Critics primarily discuss the novel’s female characters as Benjulia’s (potential) victims. But Benjulia usually lurks at the margins of the novel, while Mrs. Gallilee is its primary villain: its main plot, after all, is about Mrs. Gallilee’s attempts to obtain the inheritance of her niece, Miss Carmina Graywell, in order to help pay off her own debts.

I've previously explored some of the thinking that led to the article in posts on this blog:

• my original review of the novel
• The Beth Book, an 1897 antivivisection novel
• Lynton Abbott's Children, an 1879 antivivisection novel
• The Sorceress of the Strand, a 1902-03 woman of science novel
• looking for women of science in Punch
• my reread of Heart and Science
• A Yellow Aster, an 1894 woman of science novel
• The Call, a 1924 woman of science novel
• St. Bernard's, an 1887 antivivisection novel

I'll possibly write more about the writing process on this one at some point, as I think I learned something from doing it. It's probably the most comprehensive revision I've ever done of a piece of academic writing!

---

One day later, I received word that The Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction was out. My contribution to this was much smaller; the book has 300+ entries on various aspects of Victorian popular fiction, and I wrote the one on George Griffith, who wrote a number of a future-war novels featuring both air-ships and sexy women with untold destructive capacity in the 1890s and 1900s. It's about half a page, but I think it came out nice. I use the space to sum up Griffith, but also kind of try to push for a bigger significance for him in the development of early science fiction. We'll see if anyone cares. (Weirdly, I'm sharing space with someone I knew from the Star Trek books bulletin boards of the 2000s, but now we're both Victorianists.)

Review: The Outlaws of the Air by George Griffith

HTML eBook, n.pag.
Published 2004 (originally 1894-95)

Read October 2013

The Outlaws of the Air by George Griffith

After a brilliantly inventive book in Angel of the Revolution (1893) and a moderately accomplished one in Syren of the Skies (1893-94), George Griffith's Outlaws of the Air (1894-95) is where the rot begins to set in. This book is basically Angel all over again, but less interesting. While terrorists plot, England and Russia go to war; the terrorists sit it out with their advanced weaponry with a goal of taking over once the war has ruined the world. Only in this book the anarchists are the bad guys (in Angel, they were one of the factions in the good guy coalition), and a Syndicate of preachy capitalists are the good guys. Running the world as a business (with Britain and Germany at the top) turns out to be the path to world peace. Blech. Angel was altogether more weird, more fun, and more fascinating, but three books in and Griffith has alread turned his new genre into something, well, generic.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Stolen Submarine by George Griffith

Hardcover, 320 pages
Published 1904

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Stolen Submarine: A Tale of the Russo-Japanese War
by George Griffith

Here I am, I'm George Griffith, and I'm reading the newspaper. In it I learn that war is brewing between Japan and Russia. "Great!" I cry. "This gives me a flimsy pretext upon which to hang my most recent recycling of my favorite plot: advanced military technology used to terrorize the world by a band of renegades!" Yup, it's his sixth stab at this exact same storyline.

Despite the fact that he ought to be an old pro at it by this point, the narrative seems to escape Griffith's control. There are foster brothers, each of whom is part of a pair of biological brothers, plus a pair of sisters (one good, one manipulative), and also a pair of twins. There's also a pirate queen, a Russian spy/princess who decides to break out on her own, tired of working for the government, and as always, there's nothing as sexy to George Griffith as a woman with the power of bloody destruction at her fingertips. (I wonder what he thought of Zalma, which ripped him off but perfected the form.)

The gist of it is that an experimental French submarine is stole by its crew, as they're secretly working for a British industrialist; they then re-steal it from him and sell it to the Russians. To defend the Japanese, a British inventor  makes both a submarine and an air-ship and uses them on behalf of Japan, and since he's British, his submarine is of course more awesome.

As always, the mild-mannered British inventor, Mark in this case, turns out to be very good at killing people as he rains death on Russia from the air: "Who am I, after all, that I should wield the thunderbolts of Jove, and fling death and destruction from the skies on those helpless people down yonder? Still, I promised you—and it’s got to be done. Anyhow, this is mercy compared with what happened at Blagowestchensk,* and the most merciful way of waging war is, after all, the most merciless." So, once again typically for Griffith, bloody massacres are okay for reasons of both utilitarianism and just that everyone else does it, though there is the fascinating realization that the most clinical ways of killing are the most barbaric. Also, like in so many Griffith novels, aerial violence is the threat that will prevent all future warfare: "This must be the last war fought on land or sea or in the air, and that is why I refuse to tell even his Majesty himself the secret of the motive power which has given me […] the command of the air."

The book ends with a submarine-vs.-submarine duel where Mark kills everyone, but at least he feels bad about it.

* The 1900 massacre of 5000-8000 Chinese civilians by Russian troops.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: A Woman against the World by George Griffith

Hardcover, 320 pages
Published 1903

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

A Woman against the World by George Griffith

The protagonist of this novel is a woman whose husband was wrongfully executed for murder because of some obscure point of English law raised by a corrupt lawyer. One imagines George Griffith reading about this happening in the newspapers-- it has a very "ripped from the headlines" feel about it-- and thinking to himself, Oh, this is really rather interesting. I'd like to write a novel about it. Maybe, once her husband his dead... she could revenge herself on society by bankrolling advanced military technology to be used in acts of international piracy by a shadowy cabal! Because, after Angel of the Revolution, Syren of the Skies, Outlaws of the Air, and The Great Pirate Syndicate, it's apparently the only plot he's capable of. I mean, I guess, who wouldn't decide to revenge themselves on ALL SOCIETY after something like this? Also, Griffith clearly has a type: aggressive, take-charge women with no respect for the law, pirate queens.

Lady Sybil is actually pretty aggressive. Despite her goal really just being to get revenge on those involved in the court case, she's willing to do anything at all to get there. Her rhetorical justification for piracy is that the only different between her and a military is a government; if a nation did what she was doing, it would be a war and thus okay, but since she's a private citizen, it's arbitrarily dubbed "terrorism." (I don't think the word "terrorism" is actually used in this book, though.) During one theft, Sybil pronounces, "We shall claim the spoils of war because they are necessary to our existence. Even civilised nations do that." Later, one of her lieutenants argues, "After all, we have as much right to make war on it as the big Powers have to make it on each other, if we like to take the consequences." Is this a sharp critique of the arbitrariness of state-sponsored violence, or does George Griffith just like stories about explosions? The more of him I read, I feel like the less I know.

In her pursuit of revenge, she actually ends up creating a little utopian society, as she needs a port of call to support her fleet of superfast warships, and it in turn needs a whole infrastructure. We're told the folks living on it have it much better than in the World:

There was another very striking feature of the quaint island life which was not without its effects on the after-lives of the exiles. There was no business to be done and no money to be made. All Society conventions naturally and automatically ceased to exist. The social atmosphere was so pure it killed them. Wherefore it was not long before Lady Sybil’s guests and prisoners found themselves, somewhat to their surprise at first, acting and speaking with one another in perfect candour and honesty. Not even Mr. Merrick [a millionaire she's captured] could get the better of anyone in a deal, for there were no deals to make, and the white lies of Society had lost their usefulness. It was a curious sensation at first—speaking the absolute unguarded truth yourself and being able to believe all that was said to you—but they soon got accustomed to it.

The millionaire even learns to do actual work!

Eventually Lady Sybil hangs the real murderer, turns herself into the authorities, and commits suicide-- her men on their ship die before they can surrender, but her island civilization carries on. Her admiral is actually really bloodthirsty (he's Irish), but again, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Is his bloodthirst admirable or condemned? Or maybe it just is what it is, and he's no different than all the real admirals out there, except that he's honest about his desires.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: The Great Pirate Syndicate by George Griffith

Hardcover, 302 pages
Published 1899

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

The Great Pirate Syndicate by George Griffith

Something I've quickly learned in reading novels by George Griffith, is that he's one of those authors who, having got hold of a good idea,* thinks that if worked for one book, there's no reason it won't work for a dozen more. This is basically just like his Angel of the Revolution, Syren of the Skies, or Outlaws of the Air, except that instead of being a band of anarchists, the heroes are a band of capitalists! I don’t know what happened to Griffith’s politics—or if it was just a public backlash—but after two early novels that depict socialists/anarchists very sympathetically, all of his later books seem to go out of their way to demonize them. They use a couple anarchists, but only as tools; they are villainized or mocked. It's a bizarrely far cry from the noble, faultless anarchists of Angel.

Basically, the capitalist cabal decides that Britain isn’t any good at protecting her own interests, so they’ll do it for her. No air-ships in this one, but they do have super-fast ships and a very devastating aerial torpedo and a weapon that polarizes metal. Their actions are justified as being “business”, and sometimes we’re even told their enemies bring it on themselves! As a business, the cabal declares war on continental Europe. Their President: “Nearly all wars have been waged from motives of pure greed, and therefore, taking no higher ground than this, and granted that we are merely going to war to get back for this country what it has lost, either through competition abroad or laziness and stupidity at home, I don’t think that, morally speaking, there will be any more real piracy in our warfare than in anybody else’s. In war I take it that the end must justify the means.” Of course, what belongs to “this country” is a bunch of imperial possessions that were stolen by Britain to begin with, but whatever.

Griffith (here and elsewhere) actually evinces an interesting attitude to the violence of war. As the above quote shows, his heroes never really take the moral high ground, or tangle themselves in knots trying to explain why it's okay to bomb civilians: they basically just go, 'Well, everyone else does it, so why shouldn't we?' Two key exchanges along these lines, the first when they make a French captain watch his ship be obliterated by overwhelming force:

“That is not war. It is murder, assassination!” the French captain had cried when he saw his ship go down.
“All war is that, more or less, m’sieu’.”

And then later, the same guy:

“But m’sieu’, this is not war!” exclaimed the Frenchman.
“No,” replied Philip. “It is not. It is only business.”

Business justifies all, just as reform justified all in Griffith's earlier works.

The conspirators end up blockading Europe until economic collapse forces it to capitulate. They demand that no European nation can make war or have a military or have colonies, and that the Anglo-Saxon Federation controls all trade. No matter what political side he takes, Griffith's racial preferences are clear.

* And it is a very good idea; I think you can argue that as much as Frankenstein and The Battle of Dorking and Robur the Conquerer and The Coming Race are all important works of proto-sf, Angel of the Revolution is where the genre really comes into existence.